Dr. Martín Abadi
James H. Wilkinson MEMBERS
ACE Computer Project, National Physical Laboratory
Strood, United Kingdom
More Info
  • 1992
  • Fundamental and Mathematics Sciences (F.M.S.)
More Info
  • 1992
  • Fundamental and Mathematics Sciences (F.M.S.)
Election Remark
James Hardy Wilkinson (27 September 1919 – 5 October 1986) was a prominent figure in the field of numerical analysis, a field at the boundary of applied mathematics and computer science particularly useful to physics and engineering.
 
Taking up war work in 1940, he began working on ballistics but transferred to the National Physical Laboratory in 1946, where he worked with Alan Turing on the ACE computer project. Later, Wilkinson's interests took him into the numerical analysis field, where he discovered many significant algorithms.
 
Wilkinson received the Turing Award in 1970 "for his research in numerical analysis to facilitate the use of the high-speed digital computer, having received special recognition for his work in computations in linear algebra and 'backward' error analysis."

In the same year, he also gave the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) John von Neumann Lecture.Wilkinson also received an Honorary Doctorate from Heriot-Watt University in 1973.

He was elected as a Distinguished Fellow of the British Computer Society in 1974 for his pioneering work in computer science.

The James H. Wilkinson Prize in Numerical Analysis and Scientific Computing, established in 1982 by SIAM, and J. H. Wilkinson Prize for Numerical Software, established in 1991, are named in his honour. In 1987, Wilkinson won the Chauvenet Prize of the Mathematical Association of America, for his paper "The Perfidious Polynomial".

In memory of his contributions, the European Academy of Engineering elected him as a member when the Academy was founded in 1992.